Poetry is what gets lost in translation-Robert Frost

September 26, 2007

I have only seen one Michael Haneke film, Cache (Hidden). However, it was a triumphantly baffling and alluring film. This has created an interest in seeing his earlier films, however, since then I have been having trouble hunting down his other films in Japan. Even if they if they are available they would be only have Japanese subtitles. I guess I might have to buy them online in order to finally see them.

When I was at home this summer my friend Eric recommended Funny Games. He recently did a post on his blog about the upcoming Hollywood remake of the film by the director. The new version stars Naomi Watts and Tim Roth-two fine actors in my opinion. But, still, I would like to see the original version before the new version is released.

He also mentioned a New York Magazine profile on Haneke, so I decided to read it. It was a very interesting profile that makes me want to see Funny Games and his other films even more. I guess I might have a better chance of seeing the Hollywood remake before getting around to his German language version. Here’s an interesting discussion of Cache and violence in film from the New York Times Magazine profile, Minister of Fear:

His most widely seen film in the U.S., “Caché,” released in 2005, won Haneke his second major prize at Cannes and is perhaps the director’s most delicate balancing act. By turns both Hitchcockian thriller and cool morality play, “Caché” follows a Parisian haute-bourgeois family as it unravels in the face of a harassment campaign that is chilling in its simplicity: each morning a videocassette containing footage of the family’s house is mysteriously dropped off on its doorstep, showing the comings and goings of each family member but giving no clue as to the maker of the tape. No overt threats are made, and no explanations given, but the family — Daniel Auteuil, Lester Makedonsky and Juliette Binoche, in her second starring role for Haneke — do the rest of the harasser’s work for him. By the end of the film, a devastating secret has come to light, a man has been killed and the family is damaged beyond repair.

“Caché” is simultaneously the most conventional and the most opaque of Haneke’s films, and arguably the most effective. While one of the central mysteries of the film — the question of who is making the tapes — is never resolved, why the tapes are being made soon becomes clear. The father of the family, to all appearances a model left-leaning intellectual, is a man with a crime in his past: as a boy, during the time of the Algerian conflict, he betrayed a young Algerian ward of his family, resulting in the ward’s abandonment and eventual suicide. Though Haneke resists being represented as a political filmmaker, it’s hard to avoid seeing a message here: namely, that the comforts of the bourgeoisie have been paid for in blood, and in the case of France, that blood was largely North African. In our talks, Haneke repeatedly criticized films that summarize or explain themselves to the viewer — that do the audience’s work for it, in other words — but “Caché” comes dangerously close to doing just that. Yet, just as “Caché” seems about to supply the viewer with any number of conventionally satisfying solutions, it slyly — some would say maddeningly — refuses to choose between them, closing with an intriguing final shot that may or may not hold the answer. The fact that the film ultimately succeeds is no small tribute to the director’s considerable talent as a juggler of audience expectations.

Largely because of its preoccupation with violence as entertainment, “Funny Games” has been compared with Stanley Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange.” Haneke himself, however, views “A Clockwork Orange” as a noble failure. “I’m a huge Kubrick fan, but I find ‘A Clockwork Orange’ a kind of miscalculation, because he makes the brutality so spectacular — so stylized, with dance numbers and so on — that you almost have to admire it,” he told me. “I read somewhere — I’m not sure if it’s true — that Kubrick was completely shocked when he saw how the public reacted to ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ and that he even tried to have the film recalled. It became a cult hit because people found its hyperstylized violence somehow cool, and that was certainly not what Kubrick had intended.” Haneke shook his head slowly. “It’s incredibly difficult to present violence on-screen in a responsible manner. I would never claim to be cleverer than Kubrick, but I have the advantage of making my films after he made his. I’ve been able to learn a tremendous amount from his mistakes.” Whether one of those mistakes was to make a film that actually had popular appeal was a question that Haneke left unanswered.

Haneke’s sudden prominence, and the unfailingly extreme subject matter of his films, has led to comparisons with Quentin Tarantino, with John Woo and with the directors of the so-called Asian Extreme movement, but Haneke himself sees little common ground. “I saw ‘Pulp Fiction,’ of course, and it’s a very well done film,” he said. “The problem, as I see it, is with its comedy — there’s a danger there, because the humor makes the violence consumable. Humor of that kind is all right, even useful, as long as the viewer is made to think about why he’s laughing. But that’s something ‘Pulp Fiction’ fails to do.” When I mentioned Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” another film that “Funny Games” has been compared with, Haneke shrugged. “Stone made the same mistake that Kubrick made. I use that film to illustrate a principle to my students — you can’t make an antifascist statement using fascist methods.”

I originally stumbled across the elegant products of Chin Press Music when I came across their collection about Japan entitled Kuhaku. I enjoyed that book and marveled at the beauty of the physical book itself. Another great find was the moving stories of Japanese women in “That Floating Feeling” by Sumie Kawakami. Chin Music Press has now brought out another gorgeous full-length book by Kawakami called Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage, and the Modern Japanese Woman. Kawakami is working against the stereotype that in Japan all of your sexual fantasies can come true. She has found that while Japan is a highly sexualized place, there is a paradox in that there are many people living sexless lives or at least sexless lives with their spouses. There are a number of cultural and individual circumstantial reasons why this so: a strong Madonna/whore complex, the inability of women to support themselves financially, staying together for the children, family obligations, and so on. Kawakami’s preface discusses many of these issues in detail. It has all the hallmarks of her initial essays and a lot more as she includes stories that include unusual subjects like the stigma of counseling vs. traditional fortune telling for advice in romantic matters, “The Winter Sonata phenomena,” the Yasuko Watanabe story (executive by day / prostitute by night), male sex volunteers as well as the clients who use their services, the Shinto priest’s wife along with illicit stories of affairs and joyless, sexless marriages. The first collection of essays was only about women who cheated on their husbands this collection takes on women’s sexuality through the personal stories of a variety of subjects. It is a compelling read that I found difficult to put down, since it puts a lot of what I hear and see into perspective.

September 25, 2007

After the Wedding is a moving family drama by Dutch filmmaker Susan Bier. It stars the intense Mads Mikkelsen, who played the evil poker opponent in Casino Royal, as Jakob Petersen an Indian NGO orphanage operator who has to return to Copenhagen to meet with a philanthropic CEO who wants to fund the orphanage. Once he returns he asked to by the CEO to attend the wedding of his daughter while he is visiting. This event leads to a collision course with his past as discovers that the CEO’s wife is his ex-lover from more than 20 years past and that their daughter is actually his biological daughter. This is further complicated by the CEO’s eccentric demands that Jacob run a trust with his daughter and remains in Copenhagen, which causes distress for Jacob who has raised a small boy in India that he feels responsible for. The CEO has his reason for such an arrangement, other dramas play out in this emotional film with several stand out performances. I don't want to elborate any more on the plot for fear of spoiling the drama. It was the Dutch entry for this year’s Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film, which has turned out to be an exceptional year with the other impressive nominations, including the winner The Lives of Others, as well as Pan's Labyrinth and Days of Glory.

September 24, 2007

Muji is sort of like The GAP before it became a brand, that is if The GAP sold stationary, furniture, kitchen appliances, bicycles and that sort of thing besides clothes. It is one of my favorite stores in Japan-I ususally buy stationary and home furnishings there. This article from Slate discusses the beauty that is Muji, which is on its way to New York and beyond:

The rabid excitement over Muji is very much deserved, but the most innovative aspect of the company's products isn't the quality of their design; it's how fundamentally they redefine the idea of the design object. While other companies apply design to a product to get it noticed, Muji designs a product to be, essentially, invisible—so useful and so natural that you don't realize that it's there. More than 2,000 of the company's impeccably designed objects will arrive stateside in the next few months, and they are our best shot at being set free from design rather than tyrannized by it.

WHY are the Japanese couples in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs having sex outdoors? Was 1970s Tokyo so crowded, its apartments so small, that they were forced to seek privacy in public parks at night? And what about those peeping toms? Are the couples as oblivious as they seem to the gawkers trespassing on their nocturnal intimacy?

Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger generated a lot of attention when it first came out and not necessarily for its merits (see all the hating reivews on Amazon). It seems that Freudenberger was an intern at The New Yorker, which chose to run one of her stories and it also turns out that she has had somewhat of a privileged life being a young attractive woman with a degree from Harvard as well as a big advance for a book based on the short stories in her collection Lucky Girls. A lot of this is documented here in an article in Salon. As for the writing, I think she makes an impressive literary debut stylistically and in her character development. However, the content of the stories and some of the characters are a bit cringe inducing. I guess Freudenberger decided to slum it up in the third world for a while and all of the stories take place in places like Bangkok and India among others. Full disclosure, I have to admit that one of the reasons I picked up the book was the setting in the exotic locales. “The Orphan,” for example doesn’t seem to have any sympathetic characters. A wealthy family visits their trust fund daughter working for an AIDS hospice in Bangkok. The parents seem smug and self-satisfied and are on the verge of divorced-the daughter seems naïve and spoiled. The son is also naïve, judgmental, and self-righteous. I had a hard time feeling sorry for the narrator of “Lucky Girls,” an American girl returns to India to become a married man’s mistress he dies suddenly and tragically. Are we really supposed to feel sorry for the self-absorbed mistress who believes that she should have been at the deathbed? “The Tutor” looks at the solipsism of a wealthy expat teenager and her sexual initiation. The narrator of “Outside The Eastern Gate” seems equally self-involved-she returns to India not for her father, but because she feels she is missing something form her life and hopes to find it there in her dead mother’s journals. However, despite the fact these characters are unsympathetic, they are quite really. I have a feeling the author knows these types well; in fact she may be one of them. I would like to point out that she does have an advanced skill for describing telling details, setting a scene, and creating believable characters. Perhaps, I enjoyed “The Last Bastion” best, but that high school narrator is quite self-satisfied as well. I think the writing in this collection is impressive, however flawed, and I would venture forth that I would read future work by the author, because I think she is very talented and has bright future ahead.

September 23, 2007

There is a really interesting interview with Naomi Klein, who wrote an excellent diatribe against globalization in 2000 (No Logo), in Salon this week. It is a really insidious idea of taking advantage of people who are a very vulernable moment after a traumatic event. But I think Klein does a good job of exposing how it is done:

Naomi Klein is one of North America's most lucid translators of globalization and its defects. Her book "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" (2000) landed just after demonstrators in Seattle put demands for international economic justice on the front page. In "No Logo," Klein critiqued multinational corporations for creating poor labor conditions in the developing world, all to further "the brand."

Klein, a Canadian whose physician father and filmmaker mother left the United States during the Vietnam War, followed her concerns for workers' conditions to Argentina after its economic collapse in 2001. There, with her husband, Canadian journalist Avi Lewis, Klein created "The Take," a documentary about a group of autoworkers who occupy their dormant factory. After finishing her new book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," she partnered with Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón ("Children of Men") to make a short film. (See it on today's Video Dog.) The movie, which caused a stir at the Venice Film Festival, dramatizes the arguments of the book: that disasters -- unnatural ones like military coups (Pinochet's Chile) and war (Iraq) as well as natural ones (the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina) -- allow governments and multinationals to take advantage of citizen shock and swiftly impose corporate-friendly policies. The result: a wealthier elite and more-beleaguered middle and lower classes. Sri Lankan fishing villages become luxury resorts; public schools along the Gulf Coast become corporate-run "charter" schools.

Unafraid of controversy, Klein goes one step further in her new book than most progressive economists. She contends that in the aftermath of these various disasters, not only democracy but also human rights fall by the wayside -- all in the name of freedom and the free market. Klein compares economic shock therapy to the horrific experiments conducted on psychiatric patients in the mid-'50s by a CIA-sponsored Canadian doctor, in which patients were subjected to drugs, electroconvulsive therapy and sensory deprivation in an effort to replace their problem behaviors with a more compliant personality. If a personality can be remade, so, too, a nation. The film, with its stark images of ECT, excerpts from CIA torture manuals, footage of Nobel economist and shock-doctrine promoter Milton Friedman glad-handing Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan, and images of natural disasters (the Asian tsunami, 9/11) makes her message visceral: Be informed, be shock-resistant.

Klein spoke with Salon from London, one stop on a 10-country book tour, about Bush's privatized war on terror, how free the free market is, and whether the anti-globalization movement survived 9/11.

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You make a connection between torture and economic shock therapy. Can you explain the link?

I look at torture in two ways in the book. The first is as an enforcement tool used by states that are trying to push through an economic transformation of a country that is so wildly unpopular that terror -- including torture -- must be used to control the population. Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the 1970s are classic examples of places where very real shocks to bodies were used to spread terror, making it possible to impose economic shocks. China is another example. And I argue that the use of torture by U.S. forces in Iraq was related to the huge social unrest sparked by Paul Bremer's attempt at an extreme country makeover. Many analysts agree that his decision to dissolve the army, to fire huge numbers of public sector workers, to push through investment rules that decimated Iraqi industry, and to cancel local elections all contributed to the rise of the armed resistance. And it was at that point that the war moved into the jails and torture spread.

The other way that I look at torture is as a metaphor for disaster capitalism. Disaster capitalism is an attempt to push through policies in the chaos and disorientation that follow a disaster -- policies that wouldn't stand a chance during normal, non-disastrous circumstances. The move to turn New Orleans public housing into condos after Katrina is a classic example. So is the current campaign to push through a highly contested oil law in Iraq, even as the country spirals into civil war.

What I argue is that this attempt to take advantage of the window of opportunity opened up by crisis has some uncomfortable similarities to the techniques for psychological torture laid out in declassified CIA interrogation manuals, which I quote in the book. For instance, the infamous 1963 Kubark manual talks about how to put a prisoner in a state of shock, using various regression techniques like sensory deprivation and sensory overload. Then it states that "there is an interval -- which may be extremely brief -- of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock."

The first time I read that, it reminded me of the shock of Sept. 11, which, for millions of people, exploded "the world that is familiar" and opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that the Bush administration expertly exploited. I want to stress that I am not in any way suggesting that a crisis like that was deliberately created in order to induce the state of shock, but I do argue that once the shock occurred it was deliberately deepened. And more to the point, the impulse to exploit a moment of disorientation opened up by mass trauma is, I believe, deeply immoral, in the same way that torture is immoral, because it is about exploiting an extreme power imbalance.

September 17, 2007

Kate Elwood had another interesting discussion in her column Cultural Conundrums about individuality in last week's Daily Yomiuri. She takes on the Japanese cultural sterotype reflected in "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down":

The Japanese saying is rarely quoted by Japanese except perhaps when talking about Japanese culture with a foreign person, but all know it. Perhaps it's not necessary to speak of it because it is so embedded as a type of behavioral cautionary advice. It's interesting that, on the other hand, it is quite common in English to give voice to similar types of warnings and guidance such as "Don't make waves," "Don't rock the boat" and "You have to go along to get along" maybe because there are those who would take things too far and, like the Japanese, also get pounded down if not for the recommendation to give up striking out too much on their own on the part of concerned friends.

I asked some Japanese high school students what they thought of the character Haruko's use of the nail saying to suggest that if other students preferred text messaging it was better not to stand out by calling. They appeared to find the application of the saying in this context amusing. Text messaging is simply cheaper, quieter in public places, and less intrusive, as the person you are trying to contact may be busy at the particular moment you wish to get in touch. It's certainly not taboo to phone someone, just less common, and students are hardly hammered down for such incidental differences in communication methods.

Interestingly, the young Japanese students I've had opportunities to meet and talk to have been rather harsh in the other direction. They speak quite disparagingly regarding people who copy another's choice in fashion or style. Even in various small things like pencil cases or commuter pass cases, this kind of imitation, known as "pakuri," is a definite no-no. On the other hand, of course, nothing too outlandish is well evaluated, either. But there is quite a bit of leeway for finding your own way, and in any school there are a variety of types of children, just as in U.S. schools.

When I was a girl in the 1970s at a school outside of Boston I remember one incident of non-conformity well. Our eighth-grade social studies teacher, Miss Mellor, was trying to make a point, I guess, about gender differences. She asked each girl and boy in the class to give their opinion about what they thought was the most important attribute for people of their sex to possess. Boy after boy answered "muscles" and girl after girl answered "good looks."

Until a girl who I'll call Karen was called on. Karen's mother was something of an intellectual feminist and it may have been because of this that Karen, instead of saying "good looks" responded "a sense of individuality." It took months for poor Karen to live it down, as boys would snicker when she walked past and in mincing, pseudo-Karen voices say, "I think individuality is important." I don't think it was Miss Mellor's intended lesson, but watching what Karen went through I learned that avoiding divergence from the norm was a very important thing indeed in eighth grade.

It is diffuclut to talk generally about cultures, because there are always exceptions. But it cannot be denied that there are some general patterns in how different cultures operate. And I think conformity tends to be more prevalent here in Japan for a number of reasons (instiutional enforcement, homogenity of the race, necessity for living in densely populated areas, etc...). But Elwood makes a good case for confomrity being valued in all cultures at some level.

Jess Walter is an extremely talented writer from Spokane of whom I really enjoyed reading his previous novel Citizen Vince immensely. The Zero was a finalist for the National Book Award, so I was eager to read it when it came out in paperback. I think Walter has made a big leap in style, content, and exposition. The Zero is more ambitious in its scope. It is the story of a ground zero cop who has memory gaps ala “Memento” and finds himself in a Kafkaesque for an unknown government agency, DD (Department of Documentation), search for a women who may have escaped the terrorist attack. It a sort of post 9/11 novel as it deals with the physical and psychological fallout caused by the attacks and how it has changed the way people view the world. The novel jumps around mimicking the way that Brian Remy feels disoriented by his condition finding himself dealing with things he can’t remember doing. Meanwhile, his vision damaged from his rescue work on 9/11 continues to deteriorate and serves as a kind of metaphor. It is a challenging novel and reflects the ambition of the author to document the malaise that America faced after 9/11. My only complaint is about how the novel ends , which I won’t give away here, but it seems a bit like a cop out to me.